Poquosin by Jack Temple Kirby

Author:Jack Temple Kirby [Kirby, Jack Temple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, Human Geography, Nature, Ecology
ISBN: 9781469623863
Google: iAnICQAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-12-01T02:49:19+00:00

Map 8. Dismal Swamp ditch/canal system, ca. 1950s (From Bland Simpson, The Great Dismal [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990], courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press)

Riddick’s Folly, Main Street, Suffolk, 1990 (Photo by the author)

The charm of this particular remote place never attracted Irving. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, however, found the Dismal irresistible—without ever traveling the grand canal and ditches, and for a reason Ruffin doubtless disapproved (as we shall see in the following chapter). Porte Crayon also became Ruffin’s enemy in 1861, but his swamp travelogue, published nearly a quarter century after Ruffin’s visit, approached, at least, the lyricism Ruffin had wished for in Irving. Crayon more than fulfilled the promise of the painter.

By 1856 the Great Dismal was already old in romantic imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic. The popular Irish poet Thomas Moore had visited Norfolk in 1803 and—though whether he actually entered the swamp is in question—had become enthralled with the Edenic wetland below the city. The result was “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” a long poem of incalculable sorrow. A young woman, a prospective bride, has died: “They made her a grave too cold and damp/For a soul so warm and true.” Her spirit, however, has

gone to the lake of the Dismal Swamp

Where all night long, by a firefly lamp

She paddles her white canoe.

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